Personal weather stations communicate with smartphones via Bluetooth

February 12, 2014 //
By Jean-Pierre Joosting

IDT Technology Limited, the owner of one of the most recognized consumer weather station brands, Oregon Scientific, has specified μBlueTM nRF8001 connectivity chips from Nordic Semiconductor to provide the Bluetooth low energy connectivity to Bluetooth Smart Ready iOS and Android devices in its Bluetooth Smart 'Weather@Home' consumer weather station range, due to launch this spring.

IDT Technology claims these are the first weather stations of their kind to be able to communicate directly with smartphones and tablets. This allows users to access, via Using a free partner app users can now access a variety of parameters over a station-to-smartphone range of up to 50 m. These include immediate local atmospheric pressure (barometric) and weather forecast updates, plus temperature and humidity readings collected by embedded sensors in the station and/or up to five wireless sensors. The latter can be located inside or outside the end user's home (and given unique user-assigned names from the app).

"This is the first Bluetooth smart weather station product family of its kind to send collated weather and environmental data direct to a smartphone instead of that data being sent from sensors themselves," comments Chris Yeung, Product Manager at IDT Technology. "This allows users to get instant snapshots wherever and whenever they wish within their homes using the convenience of a smartphone, instead of having to rely on using the main display on the weather station."

In operation, each weather station measures data and then works out an average every hour that is recorded on an internal 7-day data logger. However, when the user activates their smartphone or tablet app the data polled from the weather station will be most recently recorded data.